"West Side Story" is an example of how Broadway celebrates the outsider.

"West Side Story" is an example of how Broadway celebrates the outsider.

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PBS series explores American musicals

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Israel Isadore Baline was 5 when his family fled Russia for the United States after a bloody pogrom. It was an event the boy never forgot. He also did not forget the day he arrived in his new homeland, feeling not a sense of relief as “we stood there in our Jew clothes,” he said, but a new sense of fear, the fear of being an outsider in a new world.

As Irving Berlin, Baline became not only the greatest American songwriter, but the most American of songwriters as the composer of “God Bless America,” “Easter Parade” and “White Christmas.” With other Jewish composers, Berlin helped make the Broadway musical a singularly American art form.

Michael Kantor, the man behind the Emmy-winning PBS series “Broadway: The American Musical,” revisits the subject with a narrower but even more detailed focus in “Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy,” airing on PBS' “Great Performances” at 8:30 tonight on KLRN. The 90-minute documentary argues that without Jewish composers, the Broadway musical as we know it today would not exist.

Virtually every great Broadway composer of the 20th century was Jewish. One major exception was Cole Porter, who once said that the secret to songwriting success was to adopt themes and style from Jewish music. Listen analytically to such Porter classics as “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and you'll hear the signature musical sighs of minor chords that derive from traditional Jewish songs.

For Kantor, it's not enough just to list all the composers and remind us of their hit tunes: What makes his film compelling, especially in the first half, is an almost musicological study of the composers' work to show how they incorporated Jewish songs into what would become America's greatest hits.

One of the most potent ingredients in the early evolution of the American musical was Yiddish theater, where several Broadway composers either got their start or found inspiration for their “American” songs. Long before “God Bless America,” for example, Berlin was writing comic ethnic numbers like “Oh, How That German Could Love” and “Yiddisha Eyes.” George Gershwin, ironically, tried to write for the Yiddish theater but was rejected as “too American.” Yet, Gershwin's great “Rhapsody in Blue” begins with an unmistakable Klezmer clarinet wail, and, as conductor Michael Tilson Thomas demonstrates, one of his early hits, “Swanee,” is thematically rooted in an old Jewish song.

From “Abie's Irish Rose” through “West Side Story” to “La Cage aux Folles” and beyond, Broadway has continually celebrated the outsider, the misfit, the iconoclast in one form or another.

Yet, it wasn't until Bock and Harnick's “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1964 that Jewish composers told a specifically and clearly identifiable Jewish story in a hit musical. That same year, Jule Styne wrote the music for Fanny Brice's story in “Funny Girl,” but “Fiddler” flung wide a door that had been opened just a crack in the past.

That isn't to say that Jewish stories weren't told, though: They were, but disguised as stories about other outsiders, other misfits dreaming of belonging — Porgy, “Show Boat's” Julie, the Puerto Ricans of “West Side Story,” among others.

If the second half of the film is weaker than the first, it's mostly because once the patterns of musical creation have been analyzed in the first half of the last century, those patterns more or less continued until the arrival of Stephen Sondheim who, as composer Marc Shaiman says succinctly, “changed Broadway.”

If parts of Kantor's film look familiar, it's because you've seen them before: He's repurposed a good deal of his material from previous films, including “Broadway: The American Musical.” That's fine, but perhaps the dependency on his earlier work prevents him from taking his thesis further in the late 20th and early 21st centuries beyond references to Mel Brooks' “The Producers” and Eric Idle's “Spamalot.”

When Gershwin found a defining musical link between the Jewish “wail” and black spirituals, not to mention jazz and blues, it was more than just a musical affinity: Jews and blacks shared a sense of being outsiders, and the reason their musical idioms form the basis of what we consider quintessential American music is that, chronic political xenophobia notwithstanding, we are a nation of outsiders, founded by Europeans and, over the centuries, serving as a melting pot of people from other countries and cultures.